Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
The dog sniffed the little green lizard. It wove drunkenly toward the garage door. Radish growled again. The lizard opened its jaws as if it could take on something a lot bigger than an old spaniel.
Radish whimpered and cowered down on the tile floor.
Anna clapped her other hand over her mouth too, and she snorted again.
“You women,” Jackson said. “Always afraid of a little lizard.”
The lizard misstepped and tumbled off the wall. Radish inched closer to it. The poor thing darted for the safety of a clothes basket, and Radish skittered back.
Jackson choked on a laugh.
Anna whimpered from holding it in, but soon they were both laughing so hard Anna had to lean against the wall while Jackson clutched his stomach.
The lizard stumbled about like somebody had spiked its dinner, and it snapped at Radish, who alternated between cowering and growling until the little green guy disappeared beneath the washing machine.
Jackson wiped his eyes. He blew out a contented laugh and grabbed Anna by the waist. “I love you.”
“I lo—” Anna caught the word before it made it over her vocal chords. Her heart drummed on her rib cage, her lungs seemed to fill with thick, wet clay, but it didn’t change the truth.
She did. She loved him.
She would’ve driven all the way out to his house to spend five minutes with him on a work night, simply to give him a hug and a kiss and listen to him Anna Grace her.
She would’ve baked him a hundred pies every time he threw a redneck golf game for her.
She would’ve given up her job and school and independence for him.
All she wanted was to know he’d love her forever.
But he wouldn’t. They worked because they didn’t want forever. They worked because they didn’t need forever. They worked because they didn’t believe in forever.
Except she did.
She needed the promise of forever along with the promise he’d let her be her own independent woman, but his cheeks and lips were taking on the green hue of a confirmed bachelor being shackled with the ol’ ball and chain.
Her perfect, neat, scheduled and labeled world ripped to pieces like a calendar in a shredder. The laughter caught in her throat came out as a hysterical sob. “I have to go.”
“Anna.”
He gripped her tighter, but she pushed back until he let go.
“Anna, wait.”
“No. No.” She snatched her bag out of his bedroom. “I can’t do this. I can’t.”
“I’m not asking you to. Wait. Listen.”
The desperation in his voice tore at something bigger than her job, bigger than school, bigger than her life. But she stumbled through the kitchen, blinked through tears, and counted the steps to the front door, to her regularly scheduled life.
“Anna. Please.”
She had a hand on the door knob. Two strides out the door, then across the porch, down those steps, around the cute little curved sidewalk to her car on the driveway three paces away from where she’d seen her first live armadillo, and she’d be free.
Empty.
But free.
And alone.
She hadn’t had to think about alone for a while. That was a hole her fish couldn’t fill. She slowly swiveled back to face him.
A deep groove wrinkled between his eyes.
His lips turned low as she’d ever seen them.
He reached for her, then shoved both hands in his pockets and went up on the balls of his feet.
“I’m not good at this, Anna Grace. I don’t know what it means, and I won’t pretend I have all the answers, but I love you.
” The husky note in his voice, the longing, the uncertainty, it was all so un-Jacksonlike.
But it wasn’t something she could fix. “For how long?” she asked.
He blinked. “How long?”
“When does it expire? When do you get tired of me?” She didn’t mean to shriek, but once she got going, she couldn’t stop.
“When does my label maker start giving you heartburn, and my calendar and my plans and my life not fit into yours anymore? What happens when you get orders? What if I get a job in Minnesota? Or California? Or—or—I don’t know, Iceland? What then?”
Radish whimpered and covered her nose with her paw.
Jackson stiffened. “I’m not him, Anna.”
“No, you’re not,” she agreed. “But you don’t believe in forever either.”
“I believe in you.”
He reached for her. She backed away and grabbed the door handle. “Please stop making this worse. I have to take care of myself. You can’t do it for me.”
He ducked his head. “More to life than work and school, Anna Grace.”
“I have friends and I have family. That’s enough.”
“Never pegged you for an ‘enough’ type of woman.”
Her tears threatened to spill over. It wasn’t enough.
Not by a long shot.
“You’re a good man,” she whispered, “but I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.”
And she turned and fled the man she wished she’d met first.
In his eleven years in the service, Jackson couldn’t think of another day he hadn’t been all there at work. He walked around the office, talked to his program managers, briefed the colonel, but he felt like his arms and legs and chest were empty tubes on strings being tugged by someone else.
The colonel suggested he take the afternoon off.
He wondered if Brad would be around to give him some payback. Instead, he texted Lance about lunch.
Should’ve specified he meant alone.
“Oh, sugar, you went and fell in the L-word, didn’t you?
” Kaci clucked the minute the honeymooners arrived at the Mexican dive just off Gellings.
Her eyes went wide, and she paused without leaving room for Lance to scoot into the booth after her.
“You didn’t hurt my Anna, did you? Lance, kick his ass. ”
Lance flashed a cocky grin that went too well with his flight suit. “Man’s kicking his own ass, Kace.”
“If you dumped her—”
Jackson held his hands up. He tried to explain, but the words were rolling in his stomach like one of Radish’s rawhide bones.
The problem with spitting out I want to marry her was that his mouth wasn’t wired to put those sounds all together like that.
If he couldn’t say it, could he do it?
Didn’t much matter if she didn’t want him, did it?
“Got it bad, man,” Lance said. “Could marry her.”
Kaci slugged him in the chest, eliciting an oomph. “You hush on up,” she said. “You know how many schools that girl’s been to without finishing a degree?”
Lance dug into the chips and salsa on the table. “Internet age, babe.”
“Not for lab work,” Kaci said.
Lance pointed a chip at him. “If you marry her, you can transfer your GI bill to her.”
Yeah, he had thought of that himself sometime between Anna fleeing his house as though her pants were on fire and that darkest part of the night where the loneliness had taken him down an unmanly road.
The very act of scrounging in his mind for a way to keep her told him he was swimming in a creek he hadn’t checked for cottonmouths.
He stared at his hands. “She likes to work. Likes to earn it herself.”
“Being married to the military’s earning it,” Lance said. Jackson felt Kaci nodding her agreement. “She could go full-time, let Uncle Sam pay for it. Could finish up a degree before you get orders.”
“And then have to find a new job when we move. Take a chance we end up somewhere that doesn’t have need of fuels specialists and chemical engineers, and then she’d start all over again.” His throat was getting thick, his voice clogged up.
There was an easier answer.
He could get out of the service.
A shiver thrust through his shoulders and rocketed down his spine. Felt as if his life were ripping in two.
He could have Anna. He could have the Air Force. Couldn’t have both.
The bench across from him squeaked. Kaci shooed Lance out of the booth. “You deal with Major Heartbreak here,” she said. “If she’s looking half as bad as he is, she’s gonna need a friend too.”
Jackson opened his mouth. Tell her I said hi. Tell her I love her.
Tell her I’m sorry.
None of them fit.
“She knows, sugar,” Kaci said.
And when she gave his hand a squeeze, he felt like she was using a Band-Aid to hold an earthquake together.
She sashayed out the door.
“So,” Lance said, “want to get shitfaced?”
“Will it help?”
“No, but it’ll give you a reason to look like that.”
He grunted. Lance ordered eight burritos and three bags of chips and salsa to go. The two of them loaded up in Jackson’s truck.
“Class Six,” Lance said. “My treat. Merry Christmas.”
Jackson didn’t figure the Class Six had anything that would touch his granddaddy’s moonshine, but he didn’t share that with anybody, so he pointed the truck to base.
“And then,” Lance said, sliding on his aviator sunglasses, “you can help me figure out how to tell Kaci I’m getting deployed.”
Maybe they’d need that moonshine after all.